“The RoseBouquet”

My Thursday night client has backed out for financial reasons, except when a new book comes out that needs to be put on his site. I was going to keep quite about this for a while as I have some personal projects I’d like to sneak into that slot. I’ve already been telling people who ask for my services that they need to stand in line and take a number. That is - wait until I have an opening.

Well, this morning I had a phone call from a long-time friend who had not emailed me for quite some time. He said that he’d been trying to reach me at the old email had for me, to ask if I’d help with their ministry website. (They have since found someone). I gave up that ISP address a couple of years ago because of all the spam coming through on it.

Now, at the end of that old email address of mine was a business man who wrote back to my friend and said in essence, “Hey, I need a web designer too. How do I reach that Ruth?”

There are two ministries for whom I built websites, and I sort of look after them, but they need more work. Now I feel like I better contact them and see if they really want me to advance, or shall I take on a new client.

In fact, another friend from way back said some weeks ago when we were on the phone that he needs a website. I gave him my standard answer, “take a number!”

Today I’m asking myself whether he’s got # 3 in the waiting line. I should check with him too, before I take on anyone else.

Hmm.. And I was hoping for a few quiet Thursdays to take on a learning curve regarding designing my own WordPress themes. Dare I hope that I can do that yet while we sort out who next gets to reserve my Thursday nights?

What do you think are my chances?

I hope you had a great Remembrance Day or Veterans Day weekend too! If you can top mine, do let me know.

I think I just told you my biggest news.

Winter weather has set in here, but you don’t want to hear about that, eh?

I am NOT doing well on my Christmas projects yet. But now my Saturdays should be clear, so assuming good health and strength, I hope to make good progress soon. The days and weeks are clicking by so fast.

Last week one evening I was glancing through some ad flyers when I saw a very simple but elegant Christmas decoration. A stylized (read modern) Christmas tree out of gold filigree paper. Hey, I could do that with some of my embossed wallpaper samples! So I took a few minutes to try that out, and have since done several others.

There’s still more work that can be done on the idea, but I’ve brought my efforts and that wallpaper sample book to the office so that tomorrow when Judy my volunteer in training is here, we can take photos of the steps to make these, and I’ll write it up as a craft page on the Kids Korner section of the WTM website. Meantime, the samples we make may well turn out to be handy little gifts to give to friends here at the office.

See how once I have an idea it snowballs and sprouts many other to-do projects? That is WHY I need to start earlier on my Christmas projects. There is no telling how much extra work my ideas will make for me.

My Thursday night client has bowed out leaving me with a gap in my very full schedule. However, I’m careful not to spread that news very widely yet. There are some things I want to fix on his site yet before we let it go on hold.

Then, I’ve been reading how vital it is to use the new social media for marketing websites, but this is something I need to study and learn about before I can use, and I simply had no time to devote to it, so I’m hoping to do that over the next few Thursday evenings. In a sense I feel I must hurry because it won’t take too long before someone else asks for that block of my time. Naturally, a paying client gets priority.

Did you hear me say here last week that I was going to start on my Christmas projects? Well, I made a list and took a look at one on Saturday. Mostly I spent time defrosting and cleaning and restocking my upright freezer, and winterizing the kitchen window.

Sunday afternoon I was going to design my Christmas card - but I had a nice restful nap instead. Afraid that’s off to a slow start.

This Friday is Remembrance Day. How do you honour your nation’s war heroes that day?

It doesn’t take me all that long, so I’m planning a work day at the office, to install a new operating system on that computer. There’s some serious cleaning and re-arranging needed here too, that just doesn’t happen on a regular work day.

On Saturday Western Tract Mission is having a Day of Prayer here. That is an annual event when we gather in a meeting room and review answered prayers, and lift up new prayer requests. I always find it special.

May your days be filled with special work and people as well.

So heavy physical work is not for me. I’m grateful that it is still possible for me to sit or slouch at the computer and manage to get work done. My head is clear. I can carry on.

Have you started writing November 1 this morning,, or are you still on October’s page?

I have been updating several sites, and trying to monetize them more. Last week I finished a run through on http://www.online-shopping-guides.com. I still have a couple of weeks worth of work on the aloe vera site, but then when I upload all the pages, it will have a new look n’ feel and be better monetized too.

Another site, generosity-alive.org is getting a total face-lift too. I’m hoping by this weekend, - well, it may go on to next weekend, - then I can upload it too, with a brand new face and hopefully a friendly, out-going theme.

Besides that, I’ve promised myself that in November, with the garden and yard ready for winter, I want to start working on Christmas projects. I meant to make a list and objective schedule on Sunday afternoon, but snoozed through that, so I’m not quite sure how many projects I will tackle, but perhaps I need to remain flexible for a while, right?

This is odd. In the last few weeks or so I have given away or sold several laptops. Remember, I said several people had given me their cast off laptops, and I’ve done what I could to fix them.

Three weeks ago tomorrow, I gave a working but rather old one to a new volunteer who is to learn to help me with the website for the mission, but really needed to polish her typing skills. It had Windows 98 on it, but was so old it had no CD drive, no USB port, and could only accept floppy drives. But for typing practice that would do fine.

Then my friend came to see what I had, and she decided she would like to buy the biggest and best. I winced a bit at letting it go, but she was willing to pay me for it, and she is a very dear friend. However, its battery was dying, so I’ve ordered a new one for her. Her purchase price covers all my expenses in upgrading it.

But then she called again, and said that a handicapped young man that she cares for one day a week wanted to know if I had another laptop with Windows 98 on it. He would like to play some old games on it.

Hmm… well, I did have another one, and although I couldn’t get a bigger hard drive in it, it does work, and it has Windows 98, and it comes with a nice case and some extras in the case. I had put my genealogy database on it, but - okay, if he’d pay for my expenses in upgrading the RAM, then I’d let him have this one.

Very often when I give up some things that I thought of as treasures, the Lord brings me newer and better things to replace them. I wonder what He is going to bring in to my life next.

A friend called last night to ask my advice about buying a laptop. She’s recently begun to live alone again, and felt she needed something to check her emails, Facebook, and maybe save some photos. I know her well enough to realize that is the extent of her computer use, so I advised her to go look for the smaller Notebooks or Netbooks. The price of them has come down quite a bit lately, to around $200 and so there is no need to spend $600-800 for a full-sized laptop.

A lot of people buy more computer than they really need, so they spend more than they would have to for their purposes.

In fact, if you can hold off until closer to the Christmas season, or after, you’ll find even better prices and specials as you watch the flyers and ads for the stores you have in your area. Or you could go shopping online too.

The fact is that as the iPads, and similar devices grow more popular, even laptops will come down in price. Desktops are already slipping into the background in some places. It’s all a matter of supply and demand.

For a while people were giving me their cast off desktops. Now I have received a few laptops. They are a bit harder to fix, but it can be possible.

This next weekend I will be trying to attend two different missions’ conferences. I am to set up a display at my former church in Neuanlage village, and I also want to attend some sessions of the C&MA Missions conference in the city.

At my display is where I should have a laptop ready with a powerpoint looping over and over. I must try to set that up by Friday night.

Yes, I know that the Canadian Thanksgiving is the second Monday of October. But I had been tentatively planning to upgrade my operating system on my home computer, and since that can sometimes take all day, and because Tom is quite accommodating, I planned - as do many Canadian families - to have our special Thanksgiving meal on Sunday evening instead of Monday.

Good thing I like turkey meat as that meant I had three such meals in two days!

It is quite likely that you have a Windows operating system. Maybe Windows 7, or you might still be on Windows XP. About $200-400 of what you pay for a new computer is paying Bill Gates for the Windows operating system. However, I switched to Open Source systems some years ago, and those are free, but generally you do the installation yourself. There are enthusiastic devotees and volunteers who are constantly finding ways to improve and upgrade those systems, (and there are dozens of ‘em!) So maybe once a year or two, I take time to install the latest versions of my favourite openSUSE. Version 11.4 had come out earlier this year, and since I was having several small irritating problems with 11.3 I chose to upgrade yesterday.

It can take an hour or two to do one installation, but if I’m not quite happy with that, I’ll do it over another time or two. In this case the first install went super well, and it intuitively found the new router and connected online, but since it was a basic install from a DVD and not installing from online (as I do at the office), I had to install my favourite programs after that. That took a lot longer. I believe it was nearly 4 in the afternoon when I rebooted again, and hurrah! all my files and emails were in place, and I could get BBN and back to work!

Now I’m back at the office, ready for work, feeling a bit wrung out from the cold. It is now in my vocal cords and slipping into my lungs. I haven’t spoken to anyone yet, but what is there of my voice is very low!

A big thanks, first off, to two subscriber friends who went to sign up for the Joy Gems ezine. That was encouraging. I did have to fuss over the software late that night because somehow I’d clicked the wrong thing and closed off all further subscriptions. Finally I got it resolved and was able to go to bed.

I didn’t get the PMC ezine on Effective Prayer set up on Tuesday night as I’d hoped, because that client sent me two long documents to work over into acceptable English. That work ate up the whole evening. Hopefully I can do it tonight.

Another new thing on my agenda is that we finally have a volunteer here at the mission willing to come in on Wednesdays and learn how to help out with the Kids Korner section of the mission’s website. http://westerntractmission.org/KK/ (if you are curious). I have several interest areas started there, but we’ve been praying for someone I could train who could take on some sub areas. Last week I introduced Judy to the main concept and parts of the site. Tomorrow, I’ll introduce her to the template for the jokes and riddles section, as I think that is the simplest.

I like to think of myself as having a teacher’s heart, but it will be interesting to find out if I can simplify and yet not overlook anything in the stuff that has become old-hat to me. A couple of years ago I taught Anna, where to insert the content and then to gradually understand all the html codes that surrounded her in that template page. She has taken over the Reflection part of the site, and can do it from home.

This will also help me see more clearly whether I still want to dream of teaching courses in my kind of website design and work. People are different, of course, but this Judy strikes me as a willing student.

When I checked out this Magnetic Sponsoring venture (Magnetic Sponsoring) I learned that Mike’s main secrets to greater wealth are good ad copy and getting a strong mailing list going. Then you advertise your main concern to that list. I’ve head that before, and decided that I’d try to work at it in relation to several sites. But knowing how much time I give to this RoseBouquet on Tuesday mornings, I wanted to set each one up in such a way that I’d streamline all the steps.

By getting a steady supply of regular articles for each one, and fitting in the info and the ad related to what each site is promoting, it should only take about half an hour each week to do those ezines. I would also prepare four issues ahead of time, so that if anything interrupted my pace, I wouldn’t be left scrambling to write a new issue at the last minute.

My biggest concern right now is getting subscribers to sign up so the first issues will actually go out to real people.

I have an ezine almost ready for the aloe vera site. I don’t have the subscribe form ready yet, but probably next week.

Another one, Effective Prayer, should be ready to go later tonight. It is for PMC-Ministries.com

The third one is set to go out on Saturday night if I can get some subscribers by then. It is for the site; Revival-Time-Ministry.info and I’m using my 180 Joy Gem devotionals as the weekly articles in that one. The subscribe page is up already at Subscribe to Joy Gems

For sure I don’t want to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do, and those last two ezines will not be about my personal doings, rather good devotional material, but if you would be interested, I’d be thrilled to see you go and subscribe.

As with any and all ezines I run, there is always an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every issue, so that you can bail out and unsubscribe without having to deal with me face to face. No questions asked.

This morning I got to thinking about so many opportunities that I can’t take. One would be to befriend and help the many new immigrants arriving here. But that would take hours and - well, would have to be a full-time venture. So I better not go there. Aside from my Sunday morning help in the ESL class we have in church where I am happy to help.

Then I hear about the various children’s’ ministries needing volunteers here in the city, and remembering how much I used to enjoy running Pioneer Girls and AWANA clubs in churches for decades, a part of my heart pulls that direction. But I know I’m older, and don’t have the stamina any more needed for that work. Nor all the time for follow-up of the individual kids.

Next my mind turned to the work I do now, and realize that God has worked together my personality and interests, with new skills, so that I’m doing valuable work that is very unique. I know of no one else doing the kind of websites that I build, with a good grasp of both the message to get across and the people we want to reach with it. Even the years that I’ve spent on this ezine/blog, The RoseBouquet, is coming handy as I prepare ezines for other missions and ministries.

I get to work with pictures and page layouts too, and have plenty of room for my creative juices to flow.

Ha! I guess I’m doing exactly the work I should be doing at this stage in my life! It’s different from what I used to dream I’d be doing, but it fits like a well-tailored soft leather glove. I’m wiggling down into it with contentment.

By the way, sometimes I get some nice affirming feedback from readers as well.